Coherent effects upon the scattering of fast electrons by clusters

Abstract

The ratio of the cross section for inelastic scattering to the total cross section for scattering of a fast electron by a cluster, depending on the number of atoms in the cluster, is shown to be not a monotonic function. This nonmonotonicity is not related to the well-known nonmonotonic dependences determined, for example, by the magic numbers in the shell model of clusters but is of purely quantum origin: the coherence of elastic electron scattering and the incoherence of inelastic one by a multipartice target.